


Feel the Echo

by LittleRaven



Category: Star Wars: Rebels
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Angst, Character Death, Episode: s02e21-22 Twilight of the Apprentice, Episode: s02e22 Twilight of the Apprentice Part 2, Fix-It, Gen, Major Character Undeath, One carrying the other - While the other is injured/sick/unconscious, Post-Episode: s02e21-22 Twilight of the Apprentice, Resurrection, Resurrection - A Brings B Back From the Dead
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-11-23
Updated: 2018-11-23
Packaged: 2019-08-21 09:26:21
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,009
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16573955
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/LittleRaven/pseuds/LittleRaven
Summary: Not used to getting second chances, he can now recognize that this is a third, and he will not waste it.





	Feel the Echo

**Author's Note:**

  * For [darlingargents](https://archiveofourown.org/users/darlingargents/gifts).



> Title from Vienna Teng's [Never Look Away.](https://youtu.be/i-ONycYf7EI)[Lyrics here.](https://genius.com/Vienna-teng-never-look-away-lyrics)
> 
> Thank you for the lovely prompts.

It’s not as if it’s the first time. He remembers; it’s happening again. The red light, the pain in her face; the rage fueling his every move. It’s her fault, he thinks, for not listening to him—for leaving, for betraying him. She is betraying him, as she did before, and she is making him do this. He had tried to speak to her, put aside the violence, and she had denied him. 

Her rage had been beautiful—he’d always know she had it in her, of course—and it had pleased him all the more to be able to stoke it now, the way he hadn’t before. Foolish of him, as Skywalker. As Vader, he could do a better job of keeping her; reach past the Jedi she’d denied herself to be and bring out what he’d seen when she was young, the spirit he’d recognized as his own. 

Vader knows power, knows to how to bend and break with it. Only a few words, a look, and he’d known his efforts to be as futile now as they had been the first time.

He could have helped her. She had chosen to deny him, in her misguided attempts to make him what he had been, to make him weak—and now it was her downfall. He will teach her that, he thinks as he leaps toward her, blade burning. One last lesson for his errant Padawan. 

She is out of reach, again, and that is his last thought as he slips through her trap. 

 

Vader stirs. He is heavy. 

He shouldn’t be noticing. He has lived with the weight of his armor all these years; it makes no difference to him. Slowly, he reaches out with his mind. 

In the reaching, he understands. He is buried under Malachor’s Temple, very nearly crushed by it. Ahsoka is not. 

Ahsoka is dead. 

She is dead. 

It has happened again. 

 

Time doesn’t pass in a graveyard. He knows this. He has his life on Mustafar to show for it. He had recognized Malachor for another of its kind, and now he has made it his own. 

Each moment is a moment in which Ahsoka is dead, and he remembers it, and he knows what he has done, despite the intentions simmering when he saw her at last. It will remain so. Just like the first time.

In one of those moments, Vader lifts the rubble atop him. He begins to limp to a standing position. He lets the remains of the temple crash around him. 

He turns, then, and begins to look for her body. 

 

Ahsoka is dead.

If he had been asked, and if he had been willing to answer, he would not have been able to say how long it took to find her. One jagged slab of rock. Another. Another. Vader lifts and they hover in the air; he is afraid of crushing her again. He is all too good at it. He would have done anything for her—he has tried, even though she would never let him he has tried, and the rubble crumbles to dust above him—above them. 

It’s the last time he’ll fail her. 

She is there. Beneath him, she is small again; she is the girl who died before him on Mortis long ago, still and silent. Alive, girl or woman, she had always seen him; he should have known that death could not make her anything less than what she had been to him. 

Vader should have known. 

_It wouldn’t be the first time_ , she'd reminded him. 

Once more, he is on his knees for her. Then he pulls her up in his arms, and she is free of the dust of the ruin. She is soon to be free of this world. 

She is light, as he bends his head over her. She always was. 

 

At his ship, he stops to lay her down. He turns, heading back for her lightsabers. 

There is a bird. 

He knows the bird. 

He reaches forth to crush it. 

It disappears, reappears, peering into the broken red over his eye. It is gone, it flies over the wreckage, hovers above a darkened doorway in Malachor’s hazy gloom. 

He stills his impulse for the moment. 

The memory, never far below the surface, stirred already by the sight his own actions had delivered him, flows freely. He does nothing to stop it. 

The strange light of that planet, the way it was so full. Light and dark both; the suffocation as he sought her, the way she’d fought him so well—she’d liked to go for the face, he remembers, feeling her kick and the heat of her blade all at once. The way she’d crumpled, how she looked in the dimming light of the Daughter’s body.

He who is good at remembering. 

The bird looks back at him, silent, intent. 

Vader follows it into the dark. 

 

The door is simple, triangular, not marked. He notes it as he passes by. He keeps going, lit by the bird’s soft gleam. It was small, but it never let itself get out of sight. 

Vader is aware that it could. He would not stop it. Like so much else, it was the will of the Force that he follow. It had brought her to him, he had told her; now it would bring him, the echo of her weight still burning through the metal of his arms. The burns on her arms, the scrapes that did not leak blood, no longer pumped by her stopped heart. 

It would bring him, and he does not say to himself what it will bring him to, mind full of her.  
He knows without words. 

The next door yawns before him. This one is marked, round. Surrounded with wolves. It looks different, but as dark as the last. 

He steps through. 

 

There are voices. They tug at him, quick, insistent. Obi-Wan. His mother. Padmé. He turns, seeking, and the thought of her throat under his grip bleeds into the crushed body of Ahsoka cradled, head tucked under his chin. 

It keeps happening. He cannot stop himself. 

Before him, Ahsoka alive. He reaches, and pulls. 

She is falling, collapsed—he pulls her further, tugs her into this arms, and she falls there, struggling—he keeps his grip, and she looks up at him, face full of the pain he’d seen when he’d let her see, looked up and let her look at him in turn. 

She is asking him a question, he realizes. Vader lets her draw back. She doesn’t move far. He watches her. 

“We are where we have been taken,” he says at last. 

It’s true. He has no name for the place. It is only where they have gone. Where he has found her again. 

“I’ll take that as you not knowing,” she says. 

He does not respond. 

The bird coos; Ahsoka stretches her arm and it alights on her. 

She seems less surprised by her bird’s presence than she was by his own. His certainty is validated by her reaction; this is where he should be, and he has done what he needed to do. 

He hadn’t expected to find peace in that, but it’s there. As he discovers this, she speaks again. 

“Morai. Then you definitely don’t have an answer.” She looks back at him. 

She is searching, again, for someone she’ll know. Someone she’s willing to know, he thinks, rage springing back—and she can see it, and as her face tightens he feels pain and knows it for his own. 

She felt it too, he thinks. She felt it, and she feels it now, and they are together in the pain. 

For once he can feel something else alongside it. 

“I brought you back,” he says, and he had never told her that the first time. 

“I died,” she realizes, and he does not stop watching her face as it happens. He would never, even if he hadn’t been able to feel it without looking. 

“I killed you.”

The words are true for many, but this is the first time he has been able to say them. He has killed, he has failed, he has had things in his grasp and let them all turn out wrong. 

Those things are people, and here is one of them; he is looking at her and at last he can speak the truth for himself. For her. 

“But now you are here. It is as it was meant to be. We will go back.” He holds his hand out. He is offering, as he has done with this hand many times before. 

His nerves stir as she looks at it without speaking. He waits, the moment growing. She takes it. Ahsoka holds his hand in both of her own.

He knows what she will do now, and it’s too late; the red light grows in an instant behind her and she is gone, darkness gaping in her place. 

He closes his hand and drops it in the empty air at his side. 

 

The way back is short. The bird is not there to guide him. It is darker than before. Yet he reaches both doorways sooner than expected, and he is out in the smoke of the Temple on its dead planet. It is all over. 

Vader looks to where his ship sits darkly. There. There is all that remains. 

He goes for her lightsabers again. This time he is unchallenged. He is slow as he limps toward his ship. 

 

Ahsoka is laid out straight before it. He sets her lightsabers beside her, crosses her arms over her chest, puts the hilts in her hands; he curls his own around them, tight, then releases her.

They will be the last dead things here. No one will come to Malachor again; he will not allow it. Let it float alone with the memory until his return. 

He will return, Vader knows. It’s another tomb, and he will not let himself forget it anymore than he has allowed himself to forget the other, his Mustafar just as black. Malachor is his now. 

Distantly, he remembers his master, and does not care; the emperor might see it as unimportant, a useful tool to rekindle his anger, a place with potential for secrets—his master is wise and may know there is more here than a holocron of the Sith. It does not matter. 

This is her grave, and it is for him only.

Time doesn’t pass during his vigil. He is standing above her body. The air is heavy, unmoving around him. 

There is a flicker of light out of the corner of his eye. He can see, through the broken lens, the gleam he can’t forget. 

The bird is watching him again, from where it hovers above the entrance to his ship. It is silent at first, as before, but as he looks he can see it flying towards him, stopping above Ahsoka’s head, and he can hear it coo again. 

He understands. It is as inevitable as what has already happened. It is what has happened, and it must happen again. 

He doesn’t know why, but he cannot question it. Not used to getting second chances, he can now recognize that this is a third, and he will not waste it. 

The bird coos again, soft, insistent as she had been. He offers his hand to stroke it; she lets him, then sits on it, still watching, before it returns to its place with her. 

As before. He holds his left hand over its head, and with the other, lets the glow of her light seep into Ahsoka below him. 

She breathes, burns healed, cuts newly sealed, and when she looks up at him he is done watching. She takes his waiting hand. 

He has done it differently, he has done it right, and this time she has let him. “It’s the will of the Force,” Ahsoka says, “my being here,” and she lets him pull her with him.


End file.
